Senior Experience With Nortel LearniT

Michael asked me if I could go to Atlanta, GA to attend the Americas Competitiveness Forum with Mark. Of course I agreed! Since Nortel is a major sponsor of the event, we got a booth to turn into a portable studio for Career Bytes as well as display information for Nortel LearniT.

That’s our portable studio.

Mark and I knew we were supposed to get interviews with people for Career Byte episodes but we weren’t sure how this was going to be done. We thought that the people were going to be brought to us to interview, then we were told to just grab random people and do a man-on-the-street type of interview. Needless to say, the first day of the conference was somewhat hectic in the sense that we didn’t know what to expect and only had everything planned and figured out that day. The following day (Tuesday) was very exciting and busy! Mark and I lost count of the amount of people that came to the studio to be interviewed! Highlights of the people interviewed were Ana Vilma de Escobar, the first female Vice President in over 180 years of El Salvador, Franklin L. Lavin, the Under Secretary for International Trade for the US Department of Commerce, Leonard L. Haynes, III the Director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education of the US Department of Education and many others.

Along with doing Career Bytes, Mark and I made a short video about our experience at the conference. He’s going to have a lot of editing to do!

The event itself was done very well! It was held at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta. The hotel was huge!! It had 41 floors and three separate buildings. Our event was held on the ground floor and it really did take up the entire floor. There were three large rooms dedicated to the conference. One room was the main hall where speakers would give their speeches on the stage and be heard by hundreds of others in the room. The second room was the control room, where the speeches were recorded and broadcast. Mark and I were in the third room with all of the sponsor booths and informational displays about each country that was attending the event.

We were next to Panama. In our room there was a large screen shaped like a globe. On the screen was a live feed of what was being said/happening on the stage in the main hall.

The large screen.

This is what the country’s booths looked like.

I also met the Multimedia crew of Nortel. They were all from different locations, ranging from North Carolina to Toronto. They were awesome!

On Monday night, Mark and I were invited (thanks to Melanie) to go to dinner with the other attendees. The dinner was held in Atlanta’s largest aquarium…it was very cool to get a private tour of the place. I’ve never been in an aquarium with no crowds of people around! The dinner was beautiful, we sat at a table with representatives from UPS and FedEx (kind of ironic that they were at the same table). It was very nice to have everyone involve us in whatever was happening!

Melanie, Carla, Shawn and Harla helped us out a lot when we were looking for people to interview! They all deserve a huge thank you!

Overall, the trip to Atlanta was great, really fun! Hopefully I’ll go on trips with Nortel in the future.

That’s me looking tired after a long day’s work.